I assume you have read about the resource extraction that took resources out of colonized countries to fuel the economic growth of their colonizers, and about the superimposition of the political structures of colonizing countries, stripping local authority and generating conflict. And we cannot even imagine how it must have been, and how it still is today, to replace existing social structures with those which erase and/or devalue entire empires’ histories, identities and cultures.
While the negative impacts of colonization are too numerous to cover in this brief reflection, I can share a little bit of what I witnessed while working in the education sector in West Africa.
The lingua franca (a language that is adopted as a common language) of any given destination will most often depend on the country’s colonizer, rather than the native tongue of the country’s inhabitants. While Senegal and neighboring Guinea have French as their official language, their neighboring country, Guinea Bissau, instead has Portuguese as its official language, and the Gambia, which is geographically surrounded by Senegal, is a former British colony whose official language is English. In Senegal and Guinea, children growing up speaking Wolof, Pulaar/Fula, Mandinka/Malinké, Susu, Jola, Serer or any number of other languages, most often are taught in French at school.
Academics confirm that children learn much better if taught in their local language, but this seems sufficiently obvious without it being confirmed by peer-reviewed research. It verges on impossible for most of us to imagine what it would be like to go to school in a completely foreign language, particularly one that doesn’t include cultural reference points for our own life experience.
